The end of Mowser — It's been a year since I launched Mowser at April 2007's Mobile Monday, so it's time for a progress report. Sadly, the news isn't good. — Mowser is at the end of its life in its current form. We haven't been able to raise funding, and as a site …

Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2 — One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service. This morning, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder …

AOL Buys Sphere's Blog Content Engine — Tomorrow AOL will announce the acquisition of San Francisco-based Sphere, a blog content engine that launched in 2006. The price is not being disclosed, but sources are suggesting it's in the $25 million range, or possibly a little more. More details from Om Malik

Personal Note: Conrad Got Mailed. — My buddy Tony Conrad, co-founder & CEO of Sphere just called to let me know that he had sold his company to AOL for an undisclosed amount of money. The details of this announcement are on TechCrunch and also on the Sphere blog.

Latest iPhone Firmware Saves Pictures from Safari — At last! The latest beta version of Apple's iPhone 1.2.0 firmware gives you the possibility of saving pictures straight from Safari and into the Photo Album. We tried and it works: just hold your finger against an image for a longer …

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 — Over the past few weeks, we've been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior. — With everything now in place, the rollout has officially begun.

Content Is Becoming a Commodity — Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the “era of blogger's control” is over. What all these discussions hinged …

Hitwise: Google Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo New Lows — Last week, Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo hit all-time lows. — The four major search engines stack up as follows:

Apple IIgs Original Hardware Laptop — As many of you know I grew up during the 80's and spent a lot of time with the fun 8-bit computers of those days. One of my favorites was the Apple IIgs, and when someone requested I build a portable version of it I jumped at the chance.

Another Windows veteran to leave Microsoft — Will Poole, a Microsoft Windows veteran — and most recently, Corporate Vice President in charge of the company's Unlimited Potential group — is retiring, according to sources who asked not to be named. — Poole, who has been at Microsoft 12 years …

Bridging the Gap, the Sequel — A story that Daniel Scheinman, a senior vice president at Cisco Systems in San Jose, Calif., likes to tell illustrates the cultural divide between Hollywood and his Silicon Valley. — Last year he met with an affluent film producer who marveled …